Whose Picture is in your wallet/on your phone?

A message for The First Baptist Church in Essex on October 16, 2011

  ¹⁵ Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words. ¹⁶ They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians. “Teacher,” they said, “we know that you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are. ¹⁷Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay the imperial tax^[a] to Caesar or not?”

 ¹⁸ But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, “You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? ¹⁹ Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” They brought him a denarius,²⁰ and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”

 ²¹ “Caesar’s,” they replied.

   Then he said to them, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

 ²² When they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away.

 You have often heard it said from this pulpit or another, it doesn’t matter which,  that one of the problems Jesus had with what political strategists today would have called his “base” (in other words – the larger part of the Jewish population) was that he wasn’t standing up to the Romans, or asking them to stand up to these oppressors.  For this reason he wasn’t viewed by the larger part of that base  as the Messianic figure for which they had waited. 

  Today we come to one of the scriptures that figures prominently in that view.   Here we have the Pharisees determining to try to trap Jesus, as the scripture says, “in his words”.   It doesn’t seem that this would be too hard to do – if Jesus says one thing he will set the Romans against him – if he says the other he sets the Pharisees and the rest of the Jewish populace against him.  It would seem that Jesus is in a no win situation.  So they come with a question about paying taxes to Caesar, something that is a foundational issue for an occupied people and country. 

 In giving them his answer Jesus gives them two responses: First he  lets them know that he is aware of their evil intent, that he sees right through their question to their purpose in asking it – to trap him.  And then he gives them his answer, and one that they had not expected.  He asks them for a coin of the type that would be used for paying the tax, and when they bring it to him he asks them whose image is on the coin.  “Caesar’s”, they say.  Then he gives them his answer, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

 The scripture tells us that “when they heard this, they were amazed.  So they left him and went away.”  

 Why did they go away? 

 Some would say that they were satisfied with his answer.  This would be the popular view and the view held by many today.  In this view, Jesus provided a way for an occupied, oppressed people to live under the Roman boot: Pay your taxes, do what Rome asks, don’t cause trouble,  and then go to the Temple and be good little Jewish boys and girls.  You have heard it said that we live in a country that is shaped in part by the Judeo-Christian tradition.  That “pay your taxes, don’t cause trouble, do what Rome (in our case Washington) asks,  and then go to the temple (in our case Church) and be good little Christian boys and girls” is a part of the tradition we have inherited.    It is a placating tradition.  When it is followed, the church and the government live peaceably side by side.  Or do they?

 Every now and then, the church, trying to understand their role in following other scriptures, has trouble with this “doing what the government asks” part of the tradition.  Here is an example:  The recent passage of the Alabama law designed to force illegal aliens out of Alabama has met with some resistance from churches who were trying to be faithful to the Hebrew scriptures which tell us:

 And you are to love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt.  Deuteronomy 10:19

• "Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt.  Exodus 22:21
• The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.  Leviticus 19:34

 Churches in Alabama and in other parts of the country were trying to understand how they could be faithful to their understanding of scripture and their governments at the same time.  One pastor, Reverend Robert Lancaster of Elkmont United Methodist Church said, “You cannot tell a church that if there's a man hungry out there, a family hungry out there, that they can't feed them just because they don't have a green card. That's not Christian.”

 Can you feel the tension?  I can.  I can feel the tension in this sanctuary because I know that there are some here (and probably even parts of each one of us) who are cheering on the Alabama legislature for having the courage to take a stand on an issue that other politicians just seem to dance around.  And there are others (and I hope parts of each one of us who are not so sure, perhaps because of their understanding of those scriptures from the Old Testament I just shared with us.  The argument might go like this:  Pastor, those scriptures you read for us are from the Old Testament.  Jesus said that we should give Caesar what is Caesar’s and give God what is God’s.  The law says that these people are illegal and are therefore not entitled to live, work or draw any of the benefits that I am as a legal citizen of this country. Therefore, since the Christian (i.e. the stance Jesus took) teaching says that Caesar must get his due, I follow the law of the land and the tension is gone.  Or is it?

 We must not forget that Jesus was Hebrew through and through.  His teachings were given to a people also completely Hebrew, thoroughly Jewish  and those who heard Jesus say that we should give Caesar what is Caesar’s and give God what is God’s were just as Jewish as Jesus and were similarly schooled in the Hebrew scriptures.  Let me share with you a couple of those scriptures which we should keep in mind as we hear today’s scripture with our 21^st century, non Jewish ears:

·         "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.  (Matthew 5:17-18)

• The earth is the LORD's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein. (Psalm 24:1)

 ·         Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,^[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” ²⁷ So God created mankind in his own image,    in the image of God he created them;  male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:26-27)

If Jesus came not with the purpose of abolishing the law or the prophets, then those passages from Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy  still stand and must be considered and dealt with in synch with the words of Jesus in today’s scripture with all of the tension we will feel between them.  And the tension is  there, believe me. 

I believe that those who think that in today’s scripture Jesus was providing an accommodation for the children of Israel living under Roman domination in their day, and for us to live in a tension free faith under our own government, have been misled.  Those who were waiting for a messianic figure to come and stand up to the Romans missed their cue.  Because “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein”, they missed Jesus drawing a line in the sand when he responded to that delegation from the Pharisees and the Herodians.  This was Jesus standing up to the Romans.  This was Jesus saying that because the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, then the metal that was mined from the earth to produce that coin – that metal is the Lord’s.  This is Jesus saying that because we, each of us, even the Romans, even Caesar, are created in God’s image – that Caesar doesn’t even own his own image – it is the Lord’s.  Jesus has drawn a line in the sand, and there is tension between the two sides of that line.  They walked away because in Jesus’ response, they heard those passages from Psalm 24 and from Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, all playing like background music in their heads and they saw very clearly the line Jesus was drawing in that sandy soil of occupied Israel.

 This week I’ve been watching not only the St. Louis Cardinals games, but also the games between the Texas Rangers and the Detroit Tigers.  I’m rooting for the Tigers in those games because Cal Lord, who some of you met at our vision day back in February, is a life long Tigers fan, and if the World Series should be played between the Cardinals and theTigers, as it was in 2006, one of us will owe the other a lunch. 

 The Tigers third baseman, Brandon Inge has the names of his two sons, Chase and Tyler tattooed on his forearms.  When I first saw his arms, I thought it said Detroit Tigers and I thought what a stupid thing that was to do considering how often players get traded.  But when I saw an interview with him later and heard him talk about his sons, I remembered reading in Isaiah 49:15-16 this beautiful passage:

¹⁵ “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast 
   and have no compassion on the child she has borne? 
Though she may forget, 
   I will not forget you! 
¹⁶ See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands;

 We surely bear God’s image, if not in our faces, surely in our hearts, but this is not a one way street.  There is a sense in which God is not satisfied to carry us around in a wallet or on a cell phone screen (as if God had such things) – God was looking for something more permanent – like a tattoo on the forearm – and we will not be traded.  The ones whose pictures we carry in our wallets and on our cell phone screens are those to whom we are bound by loving covenants and kinship.  There is a deep foreverness about this relationship we have with our God. 

 I can’t help but think this morning of the one whose image is on the screen of my cell phone – my daughter Elisa.   Recently we began to “bless” Elisa with a clothing allowance.  The idea is that this money is hers to use and she can spend it in any way she wants.  If she goes to the mall to buy clothes and decides that she needs a piece of pizza to sustain herself while shopping, she will have one piece of pizza less to spend on clothes.  The other day she wanted to buy a dress that we had real reservations about, knowing that she would probably not be let out of the house in it except for Halloween.  But the money is hers – that is the agreement we made and the best we can do now is offer our counsel.  I hope, but I wonder whether she will make the right decision.   

 This, I think, is how God sometimes feels about all that God has placed in our hands, our income, our nest egg, our windfalls, inheritances, our power, etc.  –  we give lip service to the one who has blessed us, as if to say “thanks”, and then we say, “Now, since you gave this to me – let me spend it, safeguard it, restrict it, for things that I want, agree with, feel good about, etc.    

 As a parent, even an adopted one, I can hope that through the process of nurture  if not genetics my daughter will make the right decisions when she stands on the other side of a line than the one on which her parents stand.  Even if she makes the wrong decision, her picture will stay on my phone and in my wallet.   God waits for us to find that as people created in the divine image, we are also imprinted with God’s DNA of compassion and justice as we consider the tensions between our understanding of what belongs to God and what belongs to Caesar. And even when we make a decision that is in tension with the way God would have us decide, God still has us tattooed on his hands.

 What is legal is not always compassionate.  What is compassionate is not always legal.  We live lives that are forever in tension between God and Caesar and it is up to us to decide to whom we will give our ultimate allegiance.   The choice is yours, the choice is mine.  But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

Whose Picture is in your wallet/on your phone?

A message for The First Baptist Church in Essex on October 16, 2011

  ¹⁵ Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words. ¹⁶ They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians. “Teacher,” they said, “we know that you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are. ¹⁷Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay the imperial tax^[a] to Caesar or not?”

 ¹⁸ But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, “You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? ¹⁹ Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” They brought him a denarius,²⁰ and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”

 ²¹ “Caesar’s,” they replied.

   Then he said to them, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

 ²² When they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away.

 You have often heard it said from this pulpit or another, it doesn’t matter which,  that one of the problems Jesus had with what political strategists today would have called his “base” (in other words – the larger part of the Jewish population) was that he wasn’t standing up to the Romans, or asking them to stand up to these oppressors.  For this reason he wasn’t viewed by the larger part of that base  as the Messianic figure for which they had waited. 

  Today we come to one of the scriptures that figures prominently in that view.   Here we have the Pharisees determining to try to trap Jesus, as the scripture says, “in his words”.   It doesn’t seem that this would be too hard to do – if Jesus says one thing he will set the Romans against him – if he says the other he sets the Pharisees and the rest of the Jewish populace against him.  It would seem that Jesus is in a no win situation.  So they come with a question about paying taxes to Caesar, something that is a foundational issue for an occupied people and country. 

 In giving them his answer Jesus gives them two responses: First he  lets them know that he is aware of their evil intent, that he sees right through their question to their purpose in asking it – to trap him.  And then he gives them his answer, and one that they had not expected.  He asks them for a coin of the type that would be used for paying the tax, and when they bring it to him he asks them whose image is on the coin.  “Caesar’s”, they say.  Then he gives them his answer, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

 The scripture tells us that “when they heard this, they were amazed.  So they left him and went away.”  

 Why did they go away? 

 Some would say that they were satisfied with his answer.  This would be the popular view and the view held by many today.  In this view, Jesus provided a way for an occupied, oppressed people to live under the Roman boot: Pay your taxes, do what Rome asks, don’t cause trouble,  and then go to the Temple and be good little Jewish boys and girls.  You have heard it said that we live in a country that is shaped in part by the Judeo-Christian tradition.  That “pay your taxes, don’t cause trouble, do what Rome (in our case Washington) asks,  and then go to the temple (in our case Church) and be good little Christian boys and girls” is a part of the tradition we have inherited.    It is a placating tradition.  When it is followed, the church and the government live peaceably side by side.  Or do they?

 Every now and then, the church, trying to understand their role in following other scriptures, has trouble with this “doing what the government asks” part of the tradition.  Here is an example:  The recent passage of the Alabama law designed to force illegal aliens out of Alabama has met with some resistance from churches who were trying to be faithful to the Hebrew scriptures which tell us:

 And you are to love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt.  Deuteronomy 10:19

• "Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt.  Exodus 22:21
• The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.  Leviticus 19:34

 Churches in Alabama and in other parts of the country were trying to understand how they could be faithful to their understanding of scripture and their governments at the same time.  One pastor, Reverend Robert Lancaster of Elkmont United Methodist Church said, “You cannot tell a church that if there's a man hungry out there, a family hungry out there, that they can't feed them just because they don't have a green card. That's not Christian.”

 Can you feel the tension?  I can.  I can feel the tension in this sanctuary because I know that there are some here (and probably even parts of each one of us) who are cheering on the Alabama legislature for having the courage to take a stand on an issue that other politicians just seem to dance around.  And there are others (and I hope parts of each one of us who are not so sure, perhaps because of their understanding of those scriptures from the Old Testament I just shared with us.  The argument might go like this:  Pastor, those scriptures you read for us are from the Old Testament.  Jesus said that we should give Caesar what is Caesar’s and give God what is God’s.  The law says that these people are illegal and are therefore not entitled to live, work or draw any of the benefits that I am as a legal citizen of this country. Therefore, since the Christian (i.e. the stance Jesus took) teaching says that Caesar must get his due, I follow the law of the land and the tension is gone.  Or is it?

 We must not forget that Jesus was Hebrew through and through.  His teachings were given to a people also completely Hebrew, thoroughly Jewish  and those who heard Jesus say that we should give Caesar what is Caesar’s and give God what is God’s were just as Jewish as Jesus and were similarly schooled in the Hebrew scriptures.  Let me share with you a couple of those scriptures which we should keep in mind as we hear today’s scripture with our 21^st century, non Jewish ears:

·         "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.  (Matthew 5:17-18)

• The earth is the LORD's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein. (Psalm 24:1)

 ·         Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,^[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” ²⁷ So God created mankind in his own image,    in the image of God he created them;  male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:26-27)

If Jesus came not with the purpose of abolishing the law or the prophets, then those passages from Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy  still stand and must be considered and dealt with in synch with the words of Jesus in today’s scripture with all of the tension we will feel between them.  And the tension is  there, believe me. 

I believe that those who think that in today’s scripture Jesus was providing an accommodation for the children of Israel living under Roman domination in their day, and for us to live in a tension free faith under our own government, have been misled.  Those who were waiting for a messianic figure to come and stand up to the Romans missed their cue.  Because “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein”, they missed Jesus drawing a line in the sand when he responded to that delegation from the Pharisees and the Herodians.  This was Jesus standing up to the Romans.  This was Jesus saying that because the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, then the metal that was mined from the earth to produce that coin – that metal is the Lord’s.  This is Jesus saying that because we, each of us, even the Romans, even Caesar, are created in God’s image – that Caesar doesn’t even own his own image – it is the Lord’s.  Jesus has drawn a line in the sand, and there is tension between the two sides of that line.  They walked away because in Jesus’ response, they heard those passages from Psalm 24 and from Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, all playing like background music in their heads and they saw very clearly the line Jesus was drawing in that sandy soil of occupied Israel.

 This week I’ve been watching not only the St. Louis Cardinals games, but also the games between the Texas Rangers and the Detroit Tigers.  I’m rooting for the Tigers in those games because Cal Lord, who some of you met at our vision day back in February, is a life long Tigers fan, and if the World Series should be played between the Cardinals and theTigers, as it was in 2006, one of us will owe the other a lunch. 

 The Tigers third baseman, Brandon Inge has the names of his two sons, Chase and Tyler tattooed on his forearms.  When I first saw his arms, I thought it said Detroit Tigers and I thought what a stupid thing that was to do considering how often players get traded.  But when I saw an interview with him later and heard him talk about his sons, I remembered reading in Isaiah 49:15-16 this beautiful passage:

¹⁵ “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast 
   and have no compassion on the child she has borne? 
Though she may forget, 
   I will not forget you! 
¹⁶ See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands;

 We surely bear God’s image, if not in our faces, surely in our hearts, but this is not a one way street.  There is a sense in which God is not satisfied to carry us around in a wallet or on a cell phone screen (as if God had such things) – God was looking for something more permanent – like a tattoo on the forearm – and we will not be traded.  The ones whose pictures we carry in our wallets and on our cell phone screens are those to whom we are bound by loving covenants and kinship.  There is a deep foreverness about this relationship we have with our God. 

 I can’t help but think this morning of the one whose image is on the screen of my cell phone – my daughter Elisa.   Recently we began to “bless” Elisa with a clothing allowance.  The idea is that this money is hers to use and she can spend it in any way she wants.  If she goes to the mall to buy clothes and decides that she needs a piece of pizza to sustain herself while shopping, she will have one piece of pizza less to spend on clothes.  The other day she wanted to buy a dress that we had real reservations about, knowing that she would probably not be let out of the house in it except for Halloween.  But the money is hers – that is the agreement we made and the best we can do now is offer our counsel.  I hope, but I wonder whether she will make the right decision.   

 This, I think, is how God sometimes feels about all that God has placed in our hands, our income, our nest egg, our windfalls, inheritances, our power, etc.  –  we give lip service to the one who has blessed us, as if to say “thanks”, and then we say, “Now, since you gave this to me – let me spend it, safeguard it, restrict it, for things that I want, agree with, feel good about, etc.    

 As a parent, even an adopted one, I can hope that through the process of nurture  if not genetics my daughter will make the right decisions when she stands on the other side of a line than the one on which her parents stand.  Even if she makes the wrong decision, her picture will stay on my phone and in my wallet.   God waits for us to find that as people created in the divine image, we are also imprinted with God’s DNA of compassion and justice as we consider the tensions between our understanding of what belongs to God and what belongs to Caesar. And even when we make a decision that is in tension with the way God would have us decide, God still has us tattooed on his hands.

 What is legal is not always compassionate.  What is compassionate is not always legal.  We live lives that are forever in tension between God and Caesar and it is up to us to decide to whom we will give our ultimate allegiance.   The choice is yours, the choice is mine.  But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.